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Another gedanken experiment - like one I had with respect to cloth face masks vs. manufactured one (not N95). It's posted around here, somewhere.
But lets look to the future - down the line with the long term effects of COVID-19. At some point, everyone who can get it will have gotten it or been vaccinated against it. That leaves only one part of the population susceptible to the virus, which are the very young. Essentially, those constantly being born.
Consider some well established parallels - like, for example, the measles. It's a contagious childhood disease. In adults, it can be very serious, indeed, but in (almost) all cases, for the very young it's not particularly problematic. Does this start to sound familiar? COVID family of virus' are already among us - have been for years - but basically they're written off as just rhinovirus' and possibly influenza. For all practical purposes, they've become a background inconvenience.
My preposition is that COVID will follow this path.
The obvious problem, of course, is that until either (or better both!) a successful vaccine and effective treatments are developed, there will a horrible death toll until this "childhood disease" status is reached.
The future, then, is going to return to not "the new normal", but just plain "normal". That is, of course, until the next nasty jumps from animal to human hosts.
(I have a feeling the vaccines will trigger long-term T-Cell immunity based upon the current observation that antigens dissipate).
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Given the questions that are arising about people remaining immune after having COVID, I have concerns about whether a vaccine will be long-term effective -- long term enough to basically quash the virus, which is a logistical nightmare because it would, in my thinking, mean getting the entire world population vaccinated more or less simultaneously.
What concerns me more is the immediate future. I would say realistically that we are at least 8 months away from a vaccine, and I fear that's optimistic. Given the world is averaging about 5,000 COVID related deaths a day currently, that's another 1,200,000 people dead. Staggering. As you say, "horrid death toll."
So from my perspective, the future of COVID is really four parts:
1. Pre-vaccine
2. During vaccine dispersion
3. Post-vaccine social, psychological, economic recovery
4. Living with COVID as a potentially only childhood illness.
#4 is probably a long way off.
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Yes, a vaccine will most likely be long term effective. How long term is still unknown, but were talking years, not months.
Ref. tweetorial by Prof Florian Krammer[^]
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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Somewhere in your schema I hope there's a placer for an effective treatment!
That would go a long way to mitigating the misery. Admittedly, people being how they are, there would likely be a lapse in caution if survival and a comparatively short recovery were all but guaranteed.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Hmm. Not sure about that: Covid is caused by a coronavirus, and the common cold is caused by one of four viri: human rhinoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, adenoviruses, and ... coronaviruses.
If your theory held, then given how long we've lived with colds, everybody should be immune by now ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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OriginalGriff wrote: If your theory held, then given how long we've lived with colds, everybody should be immune by now ...
They're finding people who are. Well, they're checking blood samples in storage for a decade or so...and finding the antibodies needed to ignore this version of corona...so the assumption is other people are already immune.
The "cold" viruses are mutable. That's why you can catch a cold over and over again, despite having had one already. So, even if they come up with a vaccine for *this* version, it will be useless three and a half days later when the virus says 'elephant you' and changes again.
EDIT: To clarify - the old blood they tested has the same antibodies that are tested for currently for Covid19, not that it indicates Covid19 was around a decade ago. So, either the current antibody tests are useless, or corona is corona is corona is corona, to mangle Gertrude Stein's poem.
modified 27-Jul-20 4:01am.
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Actually, the flu in particular and the that family of virus' have the ability to easily jump between humans and swine.
That's why, in days gone by, we typically had things called "the Asian Flu", the "Hong Kong Flu", and similar names. Although the practice is done world wide, it was particularly common in Asian countries for people to raise swine in their "front yard (at least the rural population) as a suppliant to their diet. It was an ideal setup for the jump, back and forth, and the appropriate mutations.
That's why they'll call something H1N1 as a type of flu: the "core" is the same as before (a nasty one) whilst the out jacket has mutated enough for our immune systems to no longer recognize it.
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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I started preparing a long and winding answer, but realised a simple Yes will suffice.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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What's the POV here about post COVID for Entertainment, Food or Hotel segment? How long do you think it will take for these industries to be back to where they were pre-COVID?
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Many won't. They won't be able to make enough money under the restrictions to recoup what they lost in the last N months. And - of course - insurance companies will find a way to ensure that they weren't quite as covered as they thought they were ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Here in the UK many have already collapsed. Some businesses are still closed while others are opening but restricting numbers. As to how long before they are back to normal, your guess is as good as anyone's.
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I'm not sure the pre-COVID situation was that good... Not in the hotels at least...
The Holy-land is very popular, so we - the locals - had a hard time to arrange an affordable vacation in the summer...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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I don't see the prices coming down now that foreign tourists are barred from entering the country, either.
The hoteliers claim that the problem is that between the high taxes charged in Israel and the hotel's fixed costs, they have little room to lower prices. Personally, I have my doubts. Until the COVID epidemic, large groups could get very big discounts, and I doubt that they were losing money on them.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I prefer no to answer as we have no Soapbox anymore...
"The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary." Vidal Sassoon, 1928 - 2012
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Unless we have some Israeli hoteliers among the members, I thought this was a not-too-controversial, non-political topic. 
(OK, I did mention taxes.  )
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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The small ones (called Darshinis in Bangalore, India) are still functioning OK. Takeaway food was allowed during lockdown also.
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when there's a scientific consensus on a viable and efficient vaccine (or series of vaccines).
I'd rather be phishing!
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We just need to wait for the US election in November. After that covid will go away and all lives will stop mattering.
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Only if you know who doesn’t win!
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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My wife is retiring in a couple of weeks after 27 years with a casual dining chain in the US. This is a direct result of Covid. Anyone (in upper or middle management) near retirement age was offered a really good package. She was only 2 years from her planned retirement and the deal was too good to pass up...besides, if she had stayed, it would have meant more responsibilities (restaurants) for less pay.
As to the question at hand, this pandemic has already caused many dining establishments and bars to close, at least for now...the ones with deep pockets may survive but not without massive layoffs. In the meantime, fast food and delivery are thriving.
As the numbers of cases continue to rise in many parts of the country, including my area there is a new problem arising...people are scared to come to work as some staff have become infected. Now is not a good time to be in the restaurant business.
I don't see things getting back to normal until a vaccine is widely available...maybe by 2021 but at this point, nobody knows.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I have a parser generator called Parsley[^] which I have not updated in a while.
One of the neat things it can do is link several grammars** into several different parsers, and then link the different parsers it generates together so they can use each other to perform sub-parses. There are a number of advantages to this, including the fact that you can disambiguate grammar constructs by factoring them out over multiple grammars - since the parsers each have their own parse table, you won't have duplicate entries which causing ambiguity.
But I just realized I could parallelize the code generation for it too wherein each different grammar crunching task runs its own CPU bound operation to create the parse tables. And it's easy.
** a grammar is a document that tells the parser how to parse something. Usually it's written in a variant of BNF or EBNF.
I came up with all of this during a conversation about schizoaffective disorder. My mind is really funny sometimes.
I think it helped that I've been doing so much async stuff lately.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Interesting
Can you elaborate a little on how to decide when to activate one (or more) of
the (sub?) parsers?
Of course you can activate a number of parsers simaultaneuously on a given input (sub)string
Long, long time ago in one of the compilers we used a mix of bottom up and top down (recursive descent) parsers, is that (more or less) similar to what you are describing?
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Member 12982558 wrote: Can you elaborate a little on how to decide when to activate one (or more) of
the (sub?) parsers?
The share a symbol table, so when you reference a symbol from a foreign grammar it invokes the subparser
like here's an excerpt of a grammar i wrote:
/ SlangStatement.xbnf
// This is the XBNF spec for Slang Statements (gplex version - unicode enabled)
// Slang is a CodeDOM compliant subset of C#
@import "SlangExpression.xbnf";
// Statements
// we use this with our skipped lists to get comments on to relevant nodes
Comments<abstract>; // { lineComment | blockComment }
Directives<abstract>; // { directive }
VariableDeclarationStatement= varType Identifier "=" Expression ";" | Type Identifier [ "=" Expression ] ";";
Here I bolded the import line which will cause this parser to reference the SlangExpression parser generated by SlangExpression.xbnf (a grammar like this one)
I also bolded all the foreign symbols. These invoke a subparse when encountered
Member 12982558 wrote: Of course you can activate a number of parsers simaultaneuously on a given input (sub)string
I think maybe I wasn't clear about where the parallelization opportunity is. It's in the generation of the parser source code from the grammars. That's what I can make parallel. It means faster dev cycles for the parser because it doesn't take as long to generate. ETA: but i could parallelize the backtracking. Not sure if I would gain or lose perf doing that though
Member 12982558 wrote: Long, long time ago in one of the compilers we used a mix of bottom up and top down (recursive descent) parsers, is that (more or less) similar to what you are describing?
It sounds like it. Here's I'm assuming your parsers call other parsers like the top-down delegates to the bottom-up for some things. If so, this is like that except it's all top down, not several different algorithms.
Real programmers use butterflies
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What's the local consensus on Blazor WebAssembly technology?
Is it worth learning? Do you think it will become important?
Blazor | Build client web apps with C# | .NET[^]
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Coming from someone who got out of web development years ago, I haven't used it yet, but I've read quite a bit about webassembly, and my feeling is just from the buzz around the related tech like blazor is it's gaining momentum. I think it will entrench itself in the web as it gets more sophisticated.
If you want to be prepared, I'd say learn it. Otherwise focus on current web technology with an eye toward maybe learning it down the road.
That's my $0.02 not having programmed with it. Offered FWIW
Real programmers use butterflies
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